January 18, 2006

What I Saw

The IRS seems to be targeting a number of progressive churches for investigation regarding their possible involvement in politics. At least one church is fighting back; not only have they gone public, they've hired the lawyer who used to head the IRS exempt organization division.

Sneaky? Communities on the US borders have been complaining about the Bush administration's plans to require a passport of anyone crossing the border. It costs nearly $100 to get a passport. Currently, people have to show proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate, and a picture id, like a driver's license. So now the government is proposing a special Travel Card for this purpose; it'll probably 'only' cost around $50. But the description of the card is making is sound to me very much line a national ID card. I deeply resent that this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

The TSA doesn't harass only you; now they're harassing the airlines as well! Of course, they only want money from the airlines...

The White House is stonewalling press requests for information about which White House aides met with indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Be nice if somebody asked formally; like with a subpoena. The fact that Scotty originally said he'd seek out more information and then told the press he wouldn't get into staff-level meetings suggests to me that some high-level staff may be involved.

Avedon makes a pretty convincing case for Al Gore for the Democratic nomination in 2008. If only they'd hire her as a speechwriter or something.

TrackBack

Comments

Back in 2004, my sister from Maine told me a story about an incident there--an elderly man, who was a French-speaking Canadian with very limited English, was in the habit of coming down to Maine every Sunday to have dinner with his sister. He was in the habit of doing this with no more than his driver's license, and was picked up, under our post-2001 border provisions, and held for a few weeks, without benefit of counsel or contact with the outside world, because the Border people (who were recently transferred to that post) couldn't communicate with him, and he, being old, stubborn, cranky, and probably half-deaf as well, wasn't very impressed with them--he'd been going through that crossing every Sunday for beaucoup years, why did he need special papers? Of course, it wouldn't have been that hard for them to have checked him out with the local Canadian authorities, if they felt they needed to detain him briefly--but they didn't--they held him and held him and held him. Needless to say, the case caused a lot of bad feeling along both sides of the border, as people there live "on both sides", so to speak--lots of people have family on both sides, or run errands on both sides, and so on. There are places in Canada, near the Montana border, where Havre may be the nearest place to do shopping with much selection; this is the case all along the border. It doesn't do much for good relations, and makes us look like more and more of a pure police state. "His papers were not in order."